Canon and Rules as Written

Over at http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/08/muddled-and-confused.html the writer is doing a series of posts about the covers and to a lesser extent the content of the entire D&D corebooks line since Original D&D. In the comments section a discussion about freedom vs "following the book" has come up. I am reposting my thoughts from that because its some rather important things I think most people really should heed when running and playing in an RPG. It it seems a little jumpy its taken from the discussion in the blog post above. I cut and pasted my parts I thought were worth saving and sharing.

I've always been a "fluff" gamer. Gimme the information overload (yet keep the rules simple, streamlined, and elegant!) on the setting, the peoples, the world.

Then I can gleefully use it or twist it into whatever horrible pretzel shape I choose.

Cool players won't mind. I've thrown Innsmouth pretty much as written (outside of automobiles anyhow) into Dragonlance and the big DL fan didn't complain a bit.

My players gave me a statement of truth: You are the GM.

Obviously you have to make it logically fit, but any good GM can use or change anything he wants to fit his campaign world.

I guess I am wierd when it comes to D&D. I consider Mentzer Basic THE book any new RPGer should pick up. (The only game that could be better is D6 Star Wars, which might be one of the best RPGs ever made, even if it gets wonky at high power levels. Call of Cthulhu is in the best ever running too, but its NOT a novices game at all.)

Even though I am not very fond of the old school D&D mechanics in general, I absolutely adore the "feel and charm" of AD&D1, and the worlds and fluff of AD&D2.

OD&D I own all but the Gods book, but I don't see the point in a toolkit. Mainly because I end up with something like Castles & Crusades anyhow.

Even if my next campaign will probably be AD&D2 with Basic stat advances and almost every race and class from both AD&D editions. A little from Skills & Powers Combat, a little from Battlesystem 2, a little from Rules Cyclopedia...

Now if only the Troll Lords would do a big book of races and classes so I could just start converting classic and neo classic modules over.

I think its more gamers than the books who sort of enforce this behavior, though I cannot disagree that the later era RPGs tend to push this sort of thing subtly.

Its funny how the same audience who insist on writing fanfic and fanart, much of which is rather... deviant shall we say have trouble with any level of freedom or change.

I've even seen people in fan circles insist THEIR totally unsubstantiated and totally against canon source interpetations to be the correct one and then they proceed to verbally berate and harass anyone who dissents.

A lesser example I saw myself when I joined into a White Wolf game once. My character had a silver weapon, as he was from a campaign where Werewolves and Vampires were fighting together against really bad world destroying stuff. (I can't help it. I like people uniting against the great darkness. Its my comics and anime influences showing through..) Well I took my NPC into this game. When he was revealed to have said weapon the Wolf players in this game FREAKED OUT as if I had broken some great taboo. By their interpretation its mere proximity to their PCs would cause negative effects.

Yet by the rulesbooks it DID NOT. Here we have the other PCs pooing bricks and the GM is looking up to confirm. Once it was found I told the GM I would be happy with whichever way he wanted to run it as it was his game. I was the only one who seemed to be more interested in how the GM wanted to run things than the book or the group concensus.

FRACK CANON IF IT MESSES WITH YOUR GAME.

Gaming is supposed to be about fun. Its not a peenwaving contest. Its not a competition. Its sure as hell not a good way to pick up girls. (A good way to repel them maybe...)

If we just want to level up and not affect or change anything and follow someone else's lame-o story there are plenty of console RPGs available out there.

Why try to deal with scheduling and people conflicts and the time and expense to read all these blasted overpriced rulesbooks otherwise?

Tuesday Game Reports

This week was another Heroquest week. Given my usual luck with the game, my Troubador died within 15 minutes of starting a dungeon that took a good 2 hours to complete, ending what little desire I had to play this game. It wasn't anyone's fault, just bad luck. But when something is THIS frustrating, there is little point in ruining everyone else's fun by playing and being miserable so I went from playing and doing some MUCH needed painting, to just painting.

While Pico took it as a bit insulting, it wasn't anything of the sort. 4 of the characters were long lived and were relatively high powered. He had to base the challenges to give them something to do. My support character was more recent, being the fourth character I had and totally unsuited to a mission where I couldn't be a supporter given random teleporting rooms filled with monsters. Actually, any low level character was doomed from the start in this one. MagicDrew's Elf died and he had to make up a new character who fell in the next mission, meaning for the final 3 missions he either has to hide behind everyone, doing NOTHING, or get stuck in and probably die due to being completely outclassed.

Its a flaw of the genre as I have mentioned in a previous post. Missme's Barbarian is an unstoppable juggernaut of doom and asskicking. However what she can handle with minor trouble spells instant death for a new character of any sort. If I were to go back I would take out the level system I made entirely. Long term survival just throws game balance off and after a certain point it just makes it POINTLESS for any new character to join in. It would be like running a Dungeons & Dragons game and making players roll up level 1 characters when the majority of the party is level 8 or higher. The level 1 simply has no place being there, has nothing to actually do (because higher levels do it better or can actually survive the threats they face), and mostly sits around leeching XP for hours on hours till they approach a point in being able to contribute.

And while the XP system in Basic D&D makes this ALMOST bearable (It takes roughly as much XP to go from level 8 to 9 as it does from level 1 to level 7. A fighter in Moldvay/Cook Basic needs to go from 120,000 to 240,000 to level up. A level 1 character needs 120,000, the same amount, to get to level 8, meaning if they gain the same amount of XP the newbie will be one level behind.), it still means there is massive amounts of downtime where the newbie is literally useless baggage. Not fun for the newbie or the high level babysitters. (If we are to assume 10 sessions of adventure to level up at this advanced stage, it means roughly 12000 xp per session. If unlimited levelling up is allowed (and most of the time any excess xp to take a PC up 2 levels is discarded, leaving them 1 xp away from the 2nd level up..) the newbie would hit level 4 the first session, and be half the adventurer everyone else is discounting not having the improved equipment everyone else has. Session 2 would bring him up to level 5, still mostly useless though almost capable of doing something helpful. Session 3 would bring him up to level 6, and now after 15 hours or so of being little more than baggage the player can actually fight alongside his pals. 3 more sessions to bring him to a level 7 (And hopefully some better equipment by this point. Maybe +1 gear the higher level PCs have outgrown, maybe a +2 here and there.) and he can actually give a decent accounting for himself and not hide behind everyone.

This of course is what is happening in our Heroquest game but at a much faster clip. If the GM shows pity for the newbie, he is cheating the player and giving the advanced characters little challenge. Yet on the other side, the newbie character's player is unlikely to have much fun or contribute much to the game.

In other words, I BLEW IT AND I AM SORRY.

The level up system I came up with simply doesn't fit Heroquest at all. It throws off what little balance there is in this largely luck driven game. Level ups plus treasure and equipment plus a few players having bad luck leads to completely thrown off gameplay. If everyone stays alive it can work fine. If everyone dies it also works fine. If more than a third of the group constantly live or die it all goes to Hell.

Which is what happened. And I didn't think about that part. Now, throwing in majority level lower level starts for replacement characters could reduce this somewhat (maybe 100GP per level and newbies start 2 levels lower than the party average rounded down?), but its still a clusterfrack any way you look at it.

AWW SH!% SIR, I *&^KED UP.

But on the upside I got to get some painting done, and it gave me fodder for this post. Its something all game designers need to look at. Just what DO YOU DO when new players join in to a persistent game? Letting them start out on par with players who "earned" their current status isn't fair, yet forcing them to work their way up from the bottom when the gameplay is much further along and the competition is harder isn't fair either.

And I hope Pico doesn't decide never to GM again because of it. It happens. It wasn't anybody's fault. Its a game problem that almost every GM has to face. I just chose to sit out losing any more characters ( 4 corpses is enough for any one person I think! ) and continue painting. Everyone else is having fun, why the hell should I ruin everyone else's time because my bright idea mucked everything up? I get to do some painting in a manner that doesn't totally suck. I hate painting. Its a waste of time. I would rather do other things. If someone is running a game even when I am participating I can listen and contribute and do something else while I am at it that otherwise I wouldn't do much of. I live alone and tend to be lonely most of the time. I am happy to have the company over. I had no problem painting and letting everyone else continue to have fun and smashinate monsters. I was having bad luck and it was no point in ANYONE being miserable over it.

Heck, I want more people to run things so I can get some painting done while we play. It might be the only way I ever get any painting done! :P

I got some color on some LotR minis, 2 more Heroquest missions got completed. We all got to socialize and chat and such. We all learned some things about game design due to this blog post.

Seems like a fine day to me!

New Stuff and Tuesday Game Night Update.

WITH BONUS RPG PHILOSOPHY!

Tomorrow I will post pictures and the like for the TWO 40K battles that I played in today, but this post will be a general update of.. stuff.

New Goodies!
My Ogre Miniatures and Car Wars order from SJGames came in today, giving me 3 more of the AADA Road Atlas books, bringing me up to 23 US states (and not US states in the game fiction..) where cars can war and shoot each other.

For some upcoming LOTR Miniatures goodness, I took advantage of 50% off to grab a box each of Mordor Orcs and Men of Harad, and a command blister for both of them. For the next few weeks I will get a few more, mostly focusing on the good forces since my horde of evil is rather large now. Close to 150 evil models. Its insane how reasonably priced LOTR minis are to GW's other lines. 24 single pose plastics for 25 bucks MSRP is a DAMNED FINE DEAL. The metals are a bit up there, but I guess 12 bucks for 2 metal command figures isn't too bad, and at half off its quite reasonable. For what I wanted from the clearance blisters there was quite a few Rohan and Gondor elite troops, and a little mail order should finish up them nicely. They had a nice selection of the sourcebooks and some neat metal box sets I might grab over the next few weeks or months too. Half off the metal Balrog or Sauron? Siege weapons? Sweet! Of course evil seems to have more of what I really want, but the forces of good are so hero heavy as to make up for it in some degree. (One of these days I will post on how LOTR is really an underrated game system. Its really quite excellent and many of its rules ought to be in WH Fantasy and 40K.)

More of the 1 dollar RPG books. I have another run or 2 to do on them, but I am getting some fair stuff I would have never bought for MSRP. 3 Last Unicorn Games Star Trek RPG books I picked up for Pico, GURPS Castle Falkenstein and the same's Ottoman Empire sourcebook, the X Crawl GM Screen & Adventure Module, and Robot Warriors by Hero Games for me. They had a ton of White Wolf's Trinity sourcebooks for a buck so they should be mine next week, mostly bringing what I found interesting in the buck a book section to a close.

So now I have a ton to read, a ton to assemble (and never get around to painting!), and a ton of money saved. 188 dollars of stuff. For 42 bucks. ROCK.

The game room is coming along nicely as well. The table setup is pretty good now, though more things need putting away in the next few weeks for more space and player convenience. The room has the potential to fit 10 people around the table, though 8 or 9 is probably as far as it can go comfort wise. At 10 it would be VERY cramped, and anything beyond that is pretty much a total no go. If we ever get enough people for that to matter we can worry about it then I suppose.

Tuesday's game day was a solid performer. More Hero Quest. To keep myself from getting cranky over the game I half paid attention, half based up some Ogre and LOTR minis. Not caring as much and the adventures getting easier as we level up made for a much better time overall. Pico is still taking the game a bit too serious as it is his first experience GMing, but I am sure he will learn to stop worrying and learn to love player whining sooner or later! :) (Yes he does read this. No, don't worry about it. Its a kids' game! Screw up, have fun, and don't worry about it dude!) He has begun learning the important GM skill of difficulty modifying on the fly, and our last mission wasn't a cakewalk compared to what it should be as written. Honestly Heroquest works best as some stress free childish fun. Unless the dice are really bad or the players do some really stupid things they should win most missions without too much damage.

Its actually something most of these dungeon boardgames seem to have issues with. They are either so hard as to be an unfun everyone dies suckfest, or they are pathetically easy if played as written. I've seen it with Doom and Space Crusade, and all the reports on Warhammer Quest and Descent seem to be the same as well.

I guess its better to be on the light, fun, and easy side than player abuse. The infamous AD&D adventure "The Tomb of Horrors" is always there if we need a PLAYERS MUST DIE LIKE SCUM BWAHAHA!! experience. And Paranoia, though Paranoia also encourages the players to hose each other over too for extra body count fun. (We really need to play that game someday...)

(As an aside, heavy character death is probably the reason D&D and RPGs have a bad rep. Tons of people played them in the 70 and 80s, with visions of being Aragorn, Elric, Conan, or whatever other scifi and fantasy hero you can think of. Then their dudes got killed in the first or second combat they entered, or ran into some deathtrap they had little to no chance of surviving. Most probably left right then, considering the game a bit of suck. Its sort of understandable.)

But he is getting the hang of it, and things will improve as he relaxes and gets into it. I really am interested in seeing what he can put together for his planned Savage Worlds Deep Space Nine game.

GMing is a skillset one really can't learn except on the job. Mistakes WILL happen. The trick is to never make the same mistake more than once. Everything a GM does right or wrong should be a learning experience to make their next session all that much better. As long as the players aren't a bunch of knuckleheads (and luckily my group are there as much to socialize and hang out as we are to game.. there is a reason our old 40K games always had the official unofficial Bullsh!^%ing Phase after all..) it can be a good time.

And THAT is what it is all about, really.

Having a good time!